Ranking every Premier League team by how unlucky they were in 2021-22

Anyone who tells you luck evens itself out over the course of the season is talking out of their backside. When it comes to a 38-game campaign, fortune plays a massive role, so we’ve had a look at which Premier League teams had the best and worst luck of 2021-22.

You know when watching your team if they’ve been unlucky. You know when they’ve played brilliantly and created loads of chances, but, for one reason or another, the ball just will not go in.

Then, inevitably, the opposition goes up the other end and their left-back pings one into the top corner from 35 yards out and at an acute angle. We’ve all been there, and for some, that sort of bad luck seems to repeat itself more often than for others.

With the advent of more advanced football metrics like expected goals, we now have the ability to measure that sort of (mis)fortune.

The ‘expected goals’ stat measures the quality of chances a team creates and tells us, on average, how many goals a team would score from those chances. And using this, we can work out which team is more likely to win any given game, which we can convert into expected points. Simple, right?

Of course, in reality, expected points don’t always convert perfectly into actual points on the board – like with anything that relies on averages, there are outlying results. That’s where the luck comes in. And by comparing a team’s actual points total to their expected points total, we can measure that luck.

If a team has a lot more actual points than expected points, then you can assume that they scored an unusual number of goals from very low-quality chances. In other words, the footballing gods were on their side. The same is true in reverse.

So, using this metric, which Premier League teams were the